Single image rain and snow removal via guided L0 smoothing filter

Since no temporal information can be exploited, rain and snow removal from single image is a challenging problem. In this paper, an improved rain and snow removal method from single image is proposed by designing a guided L0 smoothing filter. The designed filter is inspired by the previous L0 gradient minimization. Then a coarse rain-free or snow-free image can be obtained with the proposed filter, and the final refined result is recovered by a further minimization operation depending on the observed image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm generates better or comparable outputs than the state-of-the-art algorithms in rain and snow removal task for single image.